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Volume 077-1 - January 2023 (8 pages)
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Page: of 8
Mary Ann Dorsey
A Person with a Price
By Linda K. Jack
G >)
When they told me my new-born
babe was a girl my heart was heavier
than it had ever been before.
Slavery is terrible for men, but it is
far more terrible for women.
Harriet Jacobs, 1861’
Sold Down the River
In about 1811 a baby girl who you will come to
know as Mary Ann Dorsey was born enslaved in
Virginia. We know nothing of Mary’s early life, not
even if she had a surname. But we do know that her
birth coincided with an important shift in America’s
slave-based economy.
In the first half of the
19" century planters in
Virginia, Maryland and
Delaware had experienced
a drop in the productivity
of tobacco as the depleted
soils in those areas played
out. At the same time the
invention of the cotton gin
in 1793, and the availability of lands newly seized
from the federal government’s forced removal
of indigenous people in
Alabama, Mississippi and
Louisiana opened vast
lands along the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers to
cotton cultivation. That
expansion drove the price facing p. 553.
Slave coffle in Virginia published in James Buckingham, The Slave States of America, London 1842, Vol. 2,
‘Nevada County Historical soticty
Bulletin
eee 77 NUMBER 1 JANUARY 7,
of slaves to new heights. To meet the demand
planters in Virginia alone sold approximately
300,000 enslaved people “down the river” into the
deep South. For all slave states taken together the
number was nearly three quarters of a million people. Virginia’s profits from slave breeding and the
sale of enslaved people exceeded revenue from
tobacco.’
Those cruel practices separated husbands, wives
and children and broke up extended families.
Twenty-five percent of interstate sales involved
the destruction of a first marriage. Fifty percent
destroyed a nuclear family—many of those separating children under the age of thirteen from their
parents.’ The enslaved were often marched across
hundreds of miles in chained coffles in what histo-